J7t THE A _... / - u. . ...... , _ . :: ... = j ìT\ . , .. "' II /' .;---- r _ :: II.:: 1m /1\\\\ , *""' 0 0 . ". "',. ..00 . 0 -" . THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment A FRIEND writes: After waffling back and forth, I decided to go to the big anti-war rally in Washington. Shortly before 6 A.M. on Saturday, when I got to the corner of Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway and joined several hun- dred demonstrators standing in the cold waiting for their buses, I realized that the movement against the Gulf war was going to be different from the movement against the Vietnam war. Not nearly so young, for one thing. This group included far more elderly and middle-aged people than any Viet- nam protest in my experience, and in other ways as well it could almost have been a random sample of the neighbor- hood. There were people on my bus who, caught up in the early euphoria of the war, had hoped for a speedy Amer- ican victory, and there were a few who even now admitted to feeling some discomfort about their dissent. A man sitting a couple of rows in front of me was worried that Saddam Hussein might "draw sustenance" from the demonstration. Behind me, somebody said he couldn't help thinking that inaction "might permit this person to accumulate atomic and chemical weap- ons, which he would use against Israel, and we might end up having to fight him five years from now." In the parking lot of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, my bus converged with hundreds of others, from which thousands of demonstrators began making their way toward the Metro, and thence to the Mall This was going to be an unusually orderly dem- onstration, I could see, but the placards -almost all of them homemade-were full of feeling: "THIS Is No MOVIE," "BUSH, TAKE CARE OF YOUR HOUSE FIRST," "CONGRESS, GROW A SPINE," "WHY Is THERE ALWAYS ENOUGH MONEY FOR WAR?," "OKAY, OKAY, YOU'RE NOT A WIMP-Now CAN WE Go HOME?," "No BLOOD FOR TESTOSTERONE," and innumerable variations on "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS -BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE," which was the closest thing to an official slogan of the day. There was also a sign saying "BONES NOT BOMBS," car- ried by a low-slung dog named Elmo, who-so his friends Michael and Abby eXplained to me-had made the trip from Baltimore partly because of his commitment to peace and partly be- cause "he would tear our apartment to pieces if we left him home." In loose ranks about thirty people wide, we headed up Pennsylvania Ave- nue past the White House (the proces- sion lasted more than three hours, ac- cording to Sunday's Washington Post), and circled our way back to the Ellipse for a late-afternoon program of speeches and songs. Along the way, it .. "p '-"'æ; 4JIIi""" . "'. ,it. j Q } *"'" \ j l .." A ", . t 1i '!i ^' -. $' .". :;;:,. >'" "" -$ -;". 'ß . . ." seemed to me, the marchers were look- ing each other over and gradually com- ing to feel something more than relief about the company they were keeping. It's not easy to question a war against an enemy who aims missiles at the citizens of an uninvolved nation, puts zombie-like P.O.W.s on TV to de- nounce their countries, and pours mil- lions of gallons of oil into the sea. It's not easy to think about right and wrong when the voices of authority-the all but indistinguishable cast of govern- ment officials, experts, and correspon- dents who crowd the airwaves these days-talk endlessly about strategy and counter-strategy. Sitting at home by my TV set, I had felt not only horror at Saddam Hussein's deeds and poten- tial deeds but (as someone brought up on Vietnam) an unfamiliar pride in our armed forces and their commanders. And the arguments against the war, which had been clear enough to me before it started, had begun to seem unreal-or perhaps I should say that I had begun to seem unreal for clinging to them. But now, surrounded by well over a hundred thousand fellow-citi- zens who had been through something like the same experience and had been unable to suppress their doubts, I felt the life being knocked back into me. In the placards, in conversations, and in the speeches, I heard things I had not been hearing on TV. A num- ber of people spoke of a swagger in the public statements of the men running the White House and the Pentagon. "It seems to me that they're like a bunch of little boys out with their pistols playing cops and robbers," Sister Virginia Dorgan, who works at the soup kitchen at the Church of St. Gregory the Great, commented during the bus ride down, and Barbara Low, who was sitting across the aisle, said,